In my internship seminar course in London, we were assigned to take an assessment similar to the infamous StrengthsQuest. I have never considered how my own personal attitudes and behaviors aligned with my current work placement and my future career goals until taking the self-assessment from the Cultural Analysis Toolkit. Not only did this assessment help me better understand how others think, but also how it has begun to change how I think. One of the main concepts that stood out to me was attitudes toward collaboration and reward. I resemble more strongly a collectivist than an individualist. I enjoy group projects because I am able to build relationships with others and also explore ideas and opinions that I would not have been able to think of on my own.

My current work placement is a collective society because we work on different tasks that we are personally more familiar with, while at the same time bonding with each other. For example, my supervisor and I work on completely different tasks. She works on more behind the scenes tasks, while I work with more consumer-related tasks, like entering our products on Amazon for our customers to access. Although we sit at two different sides of the office, today she noticed I was feeling a bit down and gave me a hug. This simple gesture made me feel appreciated and cared about outside of what I do for the company. Similar to my collectivist tendencies, I am also more expressive compared to neutral when it comes to expressing my emotions. Since last week, after I told my supervisor I was feeling homesick, she’s been constantly checking up on me and making me feel better. I find it difficult to be neutral about my feelings because sometimes I get lost in my thoughts and turn a small problem into a big one, which can be bad. So it helps for me to talk out my emotions to get a sense of comfort. I realized that I want to work for a company, like TLKE, that not only cares about your job performance, but also your emotional well-being. I hope to create the same work environment when I start building my own company in the future.